Don’t Miss the JWU Culinary Arts Museum RI250 Tour & Tasting Experience

Author Mason Hemsley '27 is a Fashion Merchandising & Retailing major and works as a student assistant at JWU, contributing to JWU News.  

At the Johnson & Wales Providence Campus, there is a hidden gem few outside of our community may know exist: the Culinary Arts Museum. Home to a vast collection of artifacts, ranging from historic menus to rare cookbooks, the museum serves primarily as a teaching space for students. But this fall, the doors will open to the public for a rare opportunity to experience the museum. Visitors can purchase an advance ticket to attend the Culinary Arts Museum RI250 Tour & Tasting event on October 30-31, which features a special exhibit created in honor of the upcoming 250th birthday celebration of the United States and Rhode Island. 

The inspiration for this project began when JWU’s resident museum curator, Erin Williams, attended the New England Museum Conference, where the Rhode Island Secretary of State’s office presented its vision for RI250. “I was super inspired,” Erin Williams said. “I thought, we’ve got to figure out what we have from our collection that we can showcase.” 

For the past two decades, Erin Williams has worked closely with students to catalog, preserve, and display the museum’s massive collection, which numbers more than 165,000 artifacts related to culinary, hospitality and food studies. The collection began in 1979 through a large donation of cookbooks to the JWU Library and was later expanded through another major gift from a donor, which led to the founding of the museum itself. “Early on, the collection was very broad,” Erin Williams explained. “Over time, we focused on culinary, travel, tourism and hospitality.” 

Tying these topics into our nation’s birthday proved to be a fun and interesting challenge. “RI250 and America 250 is very much rooted in the revolutionary story, and our collection does not have a lot of representation from the revolutionary time period,” said Erin Williams. She realized she would need a different approach to showcasing Rhode Island’s history.  

“One of the first collections I looked at was our community cookbook collection, and I specifically looked for community cookbooks we have from different organizations and businesses in Rhode Island,” she shared. What she discovered was more than 140 different Rhode Island-based cookbooks in the collection.  

“We decided to include them all so that the entire RI collection could be pulled together, fully catalogued for this exhibit and made available to our students for research purposes,” she explained. “That way we gain a curated collection that’s much more accessible, and something we can celebrate in a full exhibit format for RI250.” 

Erin Williams worked closely with design student Jahnele “Jelly” Williams ’27 to bring the exhibit to life. Jelly Williams was tasked with pulling individual recipes from the cookbooks to highlight in the exhibit panels and, as the museum’s resident design student, she also assisted with the layout of the exhibit. “One of the big contributions design students make to Johnson & Wales is through the museum,” said Jelly Williams. The museum frequently brings in design students to assist with creating new exhibits or refreshing existing ones among the 16 they have on display. “It shows that we understand what we’ve been learning, and we have something real to show for it, not only in our portfolios, but as individuals,” Jelly Williams said of the experience.

“The content here bridges different disciplines — nutrition, design, marketing, liberal arts — so students get to connect their coursework with the collection in creative ways,” said Erin Williams. 

Building an exhibit that represents not only the shared recipes, but the overall community and civic life of Rhode Island was an interesting creative challenge for Jelly Williams, but one that she took seriously. “It gives voices to many individuals who might not have been seen otherwise," she said. “Through their recipes, we can connect to their lives, their time periods and their communities.” 

 “It’s really focusing on people helping people through community structures,” Erin Williams said of the exhibit. “It connects to a national movement, but it’s also grassroots; nothing happens unless local organizations adopt the initiative and act on it. Rhode Island has always had a robust, civic-minded spirit.” 

Erin Williams and Jelly Williams are excited to welcome members of the community to see the RI250 collection and celebrate our state’s history. The museum is rarely open to the public, so it is a unique opportunity to share their work with the world and showcase JWU’s extensive collection of artifacts. 

Don’t miss your chance to see the museum!

Tickets for this exclusive tour are $25. The tours will take place at 10am and 1pm on Thursday, October 30 and Friday, October 31. You’ll take a guided tour of the museum and receive complimentary sweet treats and house-brewed seasonal chilled tea.  
 

Purchase Your Ticket to JWU’s Culinary Arts Museum RI250 Tour & Tasting